Thermal management is an important factor to scalable three-dimensional packaging of optical and/or electronic components. In particular, optical components require tight thermal control in order to prevent wavelength drift. Photonics integrated circuits incorporate photonics elements which exhibit heat fluxes in excess of >1 kW/cm2 and a temperature-dependence far greater than CMOS-based electronics. When components are densely packed they must be maintained below strict temperature limits to ensure reliable operation. Thus, when optical and electrical components are stacked, the challenges in power delivery and cooling become greatly exacerbated. Since optical inputs and outputs (I/Os) of photonics integrated circuits are pluggable, there is often a high thermal resistance which exists between the photonics integrated circuit and its attached heat sink, which is caused by a low contact pressure between the I/O package and the heat sink that sits atop the package. This makes it difficult to effectively remove heat from the photonics integrated circuit. Heat can be transferred out of the photonics integrated circuit to a heat sink in the ambient environment, where it can be dissipated either passively through free convection and conduction or rack-level forced convection (e.g. fan-assisted dissipation).